This invention relates to methods, apparatii and systems for caging chickens caught at a growing site for live haul transport to processing plants where they are slaughtered and dressed for market.
The poultry industry today in the United States and in other countries provides a huge amount of the country's consumable protein, centered on chickens and turkeys. Poultry are raised from chicks to eating size free roaming in a structure called a “house”, a “chicken house” in the case of chickens. Eating size is typically a five to six pound live weight for a “broiler” chicken destined for broiling, frying, grilling, or the like, heavier for chickens for stewing and the like, and often in the forty to fifty pound range for turkeys. When a poultry have reached eating size, they are caught, caged and hauled to a poultry processing plant where they are slaughtered and dressed for market. The part of the poultry industry that is responsible for catching, caging and hauling the poultry to a poultry processing plant is called the “live-haul” industry. The term “poultry” or “bird” are used interchangeably and generically refer to chickens, turkeys or other fowl raised for consumption. The present invention is directed to chickens as opposed to turkeys, which are too large and heavy for the present invention.
A typical modern chicken processing plant receives; slaughters and dresses from 50,000 to 300,000 chickens per day, and a few as many as 500,000 to 700,000 per day. The processing plant must have caged chickens at the plant ready to be unloaded and slaughtered in order to maintain a continuous operation. The live-haul operators are charged with this responsibility. The live-haul process has to be done efficiently and expeditiously in order both to keep the bird numbers flowing to the processing plant and to minimize bird death from holding the chickens too long in cages where massed body heat of the caged chickens causes them to dehydrate without chance of rewatering (especially in hot weather months).
The high daily throughput requirements of modern chickens processing plants in the United States has led to the development of improvements designed to facilitate rapid loading and unloading of caught chickens. Before these improvements were developed, caught chickens were deposited into wooden or plastic single compartment coops that opened at the top accessible from a closeable hatch. Coops were individually man-handled onto flatbed trailers and stacked in side-by-side columns to form rows of stacks that were then lashed to the trailer for transport to the processing plant. At the processing plant, these single compartment coops caused a bottleneck, because the chickens had to be withdrawn by hand. As processing plant slaughter line numbers and speed increased to meet growing sales demands, this bottleneck needed to be overcome, and in consequence, the modern steel chicken cage was developed and is universally used in today's high volume processing plants.
This cage is a multi-tied, multi-compartmented structure having over-the-center, spring loaded doors at the front of each compartment. The doors facilitate not only loading but unloading. At the processing plant the cage is tilted forward (towards the doors) causing the weight of the caged chickens to press against the doors until the spring load is overcome, snapping open the doors and allowed all the chickens in the cage to be dumped from the cage compartments onto wide conveyor collector belts leading to slaughter lines.
The modern steel chicken cage, now a design standard in the United States, is of a size that fits an over-the-road flatbed trailer, which is restricted in width to about eight feet for travel on public roads. Such cages for chickens have tiers of side-by-side compartments (a row). Each compartment is directly over a under another compartment in a different tier, providing a column of vertically superimposed compartments. Each compartment has a solid fiberglass floor and a front opening, bottom hinged, over-the-center spring loaded solid door that closes a portal or front opening to the compartment. The cage tiers number four, five or six, and have two or three compartments per tier. In a cage having three compartments per tier (called a “three door” cage), the individual compartments run about four feet deep, are about a foot high, and are about 29 inches wide (side to side). In a “two door cage”, the compartments are about 45 inches wide. The compartment width sets the length of the cage, about eight feet, since the length is essentially a combination of compartment widths. Compartment depth sets cage depth. Thus a cage is about eight feet long and four feet deep. A typical compartment holds about 17-20 chickens of five to six pounds for a load of about 100 pounds of chickens per compartment. A five tier “three door” cage (15 compartments) carries about up to about 260-300 chickens at a total of about 1500 pounds of chicken per cage.
Weighing in at 1400 pounds of chickens when filled, the chicken cages are provided with fork tubes built into them along the length of the cage to allow the entire cage to be lifted with a forklift. Fork spread of forklift trucks and cage rigidity mandate that the fork tube pair incorporated into the cage structure run along the length of the cage at the front and rear base of the cage, putting the tubes about four feet apart corresponding to cage depth. Cross members tie together the fork tubes.
A typical live haul crew has chicken catchers, a forklift truck driver and a truck driver for each truck towing a flatbed trailer loaded with cages. Operations using the chicken cages start at the processing plant where empty cages are placed with forklift trucks on flatbed trailers with the length of the cage running across the width of the trailer, the single orientation permitted by the run of the fork tubes where the only approach available to the forklift to load the length of the trailer is from the side. Cages are loaded side by side the length of the trailer, then another row of cages is stacked and lashed atop the bottom row.
A forklift truck accompanies the cages to the chicken house farm where grown chickens ready for slaughter are to be caught in the house and are caged for transport to the processing plant. At the farm, the driver of the forklift truck has certain logistical factors to observe, both in unloading and delivering empty cages to a catching crew, and in fetching filled cages and loading the filled cages on a flatbed trailer for transport to the processing plant. When loading filled cages onto the transport trailer, good practice is to place the cages on the trailer with the cage doors facing all one way, preferably to the front where the doors face the wind, for better efficiency in unloading the cages at the processing plant for dumping. If the forklift driver picks up a filled cage with the doors to the driver's right, in order to place the doors to the front of the trailer, the driver must approach the trailer from the right side of the trailer (viewed from the rear of the trailer to the front). If the forklift driver picks up a filled cage with the doors to the left, in order to place the doors to the front of the trailer, the driver must approach the trailer from the left side of the trailer.
At the chicken house farm, the forklift truck perpendicularly approaches the trailer carrying empty cages (now unlashed), spears a cage with the forks inserted into the cage fork tubes, lifts and removes the cage, and carries it into the chicken house. Inside, the forklift takes the cage to a working area and elevates one fork higher than the other to tilt the cage from rear to front (front higher than the back). A worker places a prop under the cage to fix the tilt, the forks are withdrawn, and a worker opens the cage doors. Chicken catchers grab chickens by the legs, several at a time, and push them into the tilted cage through the open front. The inserted chickens instinctively want to right themselves immediately and move up to the opening of the compartment to escape. The solid and comparatively smooth plastic surface of the compartment floor is a new phenomenon to chickens raised on a rough litter surface, and the chickens have a more difficult time gaining purchase of it with their clawed feet. This difficulty combined with tilt of the smooth floor makes it harder for the self righting chickens to immediately scramble from the cage compartment. (As more birds are loaded in the tilted up cage, the birds gravitate to the back and load more weight to the rear than the front. If the cage is too steeply tilted, the cage will tip over backwards during loading. Experience has shown that a safe cage tilt angle is in the range of from about 11 to about 16 degrees from horizontal.)
During the time a cage is being filled, the forklift truck returns to the trailer, fetches another empty cage, brings it to the work area, tilts it by raising one fork more than the other, allows a crew member to prop it at the desired angle, withdraws the forks, and drives to the now filled cage, approaching it from a side that will position the cage doors to the left or right of the driver, whichever is the correct orientation for placing the cage on the trailer with the doors to the front of the trailer. The filled cage is forked from the proper side with the forks positioned one side higher than the other to fit the tubes at their relative elevation for the angle at which the cage is propped up. The cage is then lifted, the forks are adjusted to equal elevation thereby to level the cage, and the cage is carried out of the chicken house to the trailer upon which it is placed in proper orientation.
The speed with which the tilted cage is filled by the workers and the speed with which the tilted filled cage is retrieved and leveled by the forklift is important. The first chickens loaded in the compartment of the tilted cage are impressed by the weight of the later loaded chickens, which are “up-slope” to them in that compartment with the door closed. This “burying” of the chickens in the rear of a compartment continues so long as other compartments are being loaded and until the filled and tilted cage is retrieved and leveled by the forklift. If too long a time is taken to load the cage for retrievel or for the fork lift to pick up and level a cage already loaded, chickens at the rear of the cage risk smothering.
Modern poultry science permits raising about one chicken per 0.6 square foot of area. U.S. chicken houses typically are single story, about 40 feet wide, and from 300 feet long (12,000 square feet) to 500 feet long (20,000 square feet). A typical chicken house of from 12,000 to 20,000 sq. ft. may contain from about 20,000 to 33,000 chickens. Loading a three door five tier cage of 15 compartments each with about 20 five pound chickens (about 300 per cage), means that catching a 20,000 bird house requires about 66 cages (about three trailers) and a 30,000 bird house needs about 100 cages (about four trailers). A catcher typically catches several chickens in each hand and lifts them into an open cage compartment in the loading process. At a nominal five pounds per bird and two or three chickens per hand, each lift deposits up to 15 pounds, sometimes more, until all the chickens are caught and loaded. With nine catchers in a typical crew catching a 20,000 bird house, each catcher cages 5½ to 6 tons of chickens.
The physically demanding nature of chicken catching, the hugely increasing volume of chickens being processed for consumption, and a shrinking labor pool for this kind of work in the United States has lead to efforts to automate and mechanize the catching and cooping process. These efforts, indeed, are international, with efforts in different countries focusing on the particular life haul problems found in those countries. In Europe, chicken raising and consumption has not advanced to the huge scale in the United States, and perhaps for that reason the front-doored steel cage construction in wide use in the United States has not been universally adapted there; instead mechanization there has developed for loading and handling plastic trays or drawers largely of open top construction.
Examples of U.S. Patents and granted to European inventors and directed to catching and/or caging chickens in open top containers include:
TABLE 14,669,423Open top traysNetherlands4,669,423Open top traysNetherlands4,736,710Open top traysNetherlands5,470,194Side opening drawersNetherlands5,975,029Open top traysNetherlands4,365,591Open top drawersU.K.4,766,850Side-opening cageU.K.5,660,147Open top drawersU.K.5,699,755Open top drawersU.K.
Generally, efforts to mechanize the chicken catching and caging process have fallen into either the catching process alone or that process combined with a process for cooping chickens after capture. There have been numerous designs.
Examples of patents granted for inventions for the bird catching methods or apparatus only include the following (all to European inventors):
TABLE 24,508,062Berry et al.U.K.4,513,689Berry et al.U.K.4,900,292Berry et al.U.K.5,259,811Berry et al.U.K.5,361,727Berry et al.U.K.5,863,174MolaItaly
Examples of patents granted for inventions for catching and cooping or just cooping captured poultry (specifically turkey in one particular case) are the following:
TABLE 33,921,588Ledwell et al.U.S.4,037,565Ledwell et al.U.S.4,467,745Ledwell et al.U.S.4,301,769MolaItaly4,600,351NelsonU.S.5,325,820Briggs et al.U.S.5,385,117Hollis et al.U.S.5,592,902HortonU.S.5,706,765HortonU.S.5,743,217JeromeU.S.
Among the patents listed in Table 3 are examples showing different approaches to staging coop frames or cages for serial loading of successive such coop frames or cages. Other patents directed only to staging successive frames or cages for loading include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,476,353to Mola and 5,791,854 to Cattaruzzi.
The foregoing designs have found only limited acceptance in the live haul industry, and the industry continues to demand a viable solution. Important considerations for a mechanized chicken cager include that it has to be transported on public roads to the chickens farm. At the chicken house, it should be able to enter the house and work there within width and height limitations imposed by frame of the house. Grower houses in the United States are not uniform in configuration. Some have a center post narrowing the span within which the equipment can travel. House end door heights and widths can be a limiting factor. Rafter heights range are normally about eight feet or more in the more modern houses in the Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and other southern chicken raising states. During the catching process, chicken feeder troughs and watering troughs typically are drawn up to the rafters to get them out of the way. This effectively reduces the overhead clearance for catching and caging equipment.
A mechanized chickens catching and caging operation that is to be usefully engaged in the United States must work with the modern steel chicken cages now standard in the United States, and must be supported by a constant supply of empty cages for filling, and at the same time, removal of cages already filled. A mechanized chicken cager should allow for maneuverability of cooperating forklift trucks which must bring it empty cages and remove filled cages. It should facilitate rapid cage filling and should be easy and simple to operate in order to maximize the skill levels of the labor pool who will be available to operate it. Machinery for providing a constant supply and removal of cages in addition should be narrow enough to be towed both over public roads and, necessarily, in chicken houses where the mechanized catching and loading operations must be supported. Further, it should integrate with the logistics for forklift operations at the farm site that are described above, allowing forklift placement and removal of cages in proper orientation for correct loading on a flatbed transport trailer.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,660,147 and 5,699,755, cited in Table 1 above, described one method for handling coops in connection with catching and loading chickens, using a towed working trailer in which a rectangular cage frame is longitudinally placed on the right rear of the trailer, advanced and turned to the front of the trailer for filling, and returned longitudinally to the left rear for removal. The cage frames have open top slidable drawer coops. The coop drawers are slidable in and out from either side of the cage frame, so there is no actual front or rear to the frame and coops. Thus it is unimportant whether the right side or left side of the cage frame is placed longitudinally on the towed working trailer, advanced to the front, and returned to the rear. This cage cycling system does not work for a steel cages with front loading doors such as used in the United States where the orientation of the front loading doors must be taken into account. If the system described in these patents were used with a steel cage having front opening doors, it would be necessary to deposit the cage on the described right rear loading location with the doors oriented to the right side of the trailer in order to turn the doors to face the front, as indicated in these patents, for cage filling. This would result in the cage being returned to the rear offloading position with the doors oriented to the left side of the working trailer. Thus a forklift driver would be constrained to unload the front doored cages from the right side of the transport trailer and to load the filled cages onto the left side of the trailer. This is unsuitable for a general purpose device.
Some of the above cited patents describe mechanisms for staging and filing steel chicken cages having front opening doors, namely, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,325,820, 5,592,902 and 5,706,765. U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,820, using a side filling process, places two cages on opposite sides of a conveyor aisle such that viewed from the rear of the apparatus, the cage on the left of the aisle has its doors on the right, and the cage on the right of the aisle has its doors on the left. Placement of the cages onto and removal of the cage from this apparatus requires forklift access to both sides of a transport trailer and is accordingly unsuitable for general use. U.S. Pat. No. 5,592,902, using a front filling process, places and removes a front doored cage with the doors to the same side, but cannot stage a second empty cage until after a first empty cage is filled and returned to an off loading position. U.S. Pat. No. 5,706,765, using another side filling process, places and removes a front doored cage with the doors to the same side, but the manner of staging of the cages is unsuitable for front filling, because it requires a forklift to approach the staging platform from the side for offloading a filled cage while one is placed in filling position, thus the staging platform would have to be at least twice as wide as the cage length. Since these cages typically run 8 feet long, the platform would be at least 16 feet wide, too wide for towing over public highways and too wide for a working trailer in many chicken houses. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,476,353 to Mola and 5,791,854 to Cattaruzzi are based on a carousel concept.
In general, forklift maneuverability for side access to a staging platform is limited in chicken houses; most permit only forklift access longitudinally in the house, and since the catching and caging operations longitudinally precede the cage deposit and retrieval operations in the chicken house, forklift access is usually constrained to an approach from the rear, not the side.
Among the purposes of this invention is to provide a working platform, preferably a towable working trailer, useful in connection with mechanized chickens catching and front loading equipment that will allow front opening steel chicken cages to be deposited onto the rear of the working trailer with the doors facing one side of the trailer, will reposition the cage to the front of the trailer for front loading, and will return the loaded cage to the rear for offloading with the doors oriented in the same direction as when originally placed on the working conveyor. Further a purpose is to obtain the forgoing, while simultaneously allowing deposit of an empty cage as one cage is filling, with positioning of that empty cage for filling while the filled cage is repositioned for offloading. Still further, it is an objective to accomplish all this yet still permit the working trailer to be trailered over public roads and towed in chicken houses.
These and other benefits are given by the present invention.